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Partners Flock to SonicWall in Record Numbers

In its first 150 days as an independent company, SonicWall has charted unprecedented growth in partner engagement across numerous metrics, including:

• Since launching the SecureFirst Partner Program, which provides expanded sales and technical enablement in addition to aggressive partner rewards and deal protection, over 10,000 partners have registered in 150 days.
• Partners have registered for SecureFirst from 90 countries, underscoring the global nature of the cyber arms race and the extensive reach of SonicWall’s channel.
• Record numbers of partners have participated in SonicWall educational events, including attendance at SonicWall Virtual PEAK Performance in March 2017 which more than doubled year-over-year to over 1,300 partners.

SMBs Face Mounting Cybersecurity Challenges

SonicWall has also made unprecedented investments in mining and analysing data collected by the SonicWall Global Response Intelligent Defense (GRID) Threat Network which collects real-time data from more than a million sensors worldwide. Key findings as reported in the SonicWall 2017 Annual Threat Report include that ransomware attack attempts, one of the most insidious new threats, grew by 167 times year-over-year to 638 million and in the majority of cases is launched via email. Additionally, SonicWall research shows that 62 percent of Internet sessions are now encrypted with either SSL or TLS, providing greater data security but also building a dark channel that threat actors can leverage to launch encrypted attacks.

Many small to medium-size businesses are extremely shorthanded when it comes to having the resources on hand to address these new advanced threats. Information security non-profit ISACA predicts a shortage of two million cybersecurity professionals by 2019. Partners are invaluable IT consultants helping SMBs put in place the technologies to detect and prevent security breaches, but partners continue to clamour for more focused real-time education.

New SonicWall University Enables Partners to Bridge the Cybersecurity Threats and Skills Gap

To address the lack of trained cybersecurity resources available to SMBs and enable SonicWall partners to provide the best real-time industry offerings to their customers, SonicWall unveiled today SonicWall University. This channel enablement program is designed as an extension of the SecureFirst Partner Program, helping communicate insights SonicWall has gleaned from the SonicWall GRID Threat Network to the partner community in a structure they can learn from easily.

More than 5,600 individuals in the SonicWall channel already have earned technical certifications through existing SonicWall certification programs which will continue. Now partners can also access SonicWall University with rich enablement content, tools and resources delivered via an on-demand, web-based platform. SonicWall University highlights include:

• Specialised, role-based training and accreditation tailored to the three different audiences of sales, systems engineers and support team members. This opens up training to new audiences beyond traditional post-sales technical certification.
• All of the training modules SonicWall uses to educate its own employees are now available to partners, and will be updated regularly with up-to-the-minute content based on the SonicWall GRID Threat Network.
• In addition to the curriculum developed by SonicWall, third-party content from industry sources as well as SonicWall partner-contributed content will be hosted. SonicWall expects this partner-to-partner collaboration and enablement to scale up significantly and accelerate knowledge transfer for all who participate.

New Marketing Initiatives Shift Focus from Breach Detection to Breach Prevention
In addition to SonicWall University, SonicWall unveiled today a major marketing campaign in response to partner requests to help educate prospective and current customers on the most pressing cyber threats today. Partners can access prepackaged campaign materials and apply for market development funds online through a new SonicWall Partner Portal. Partners can earn special discounts and rebates for using these programs to drive business.

The goal of the campaign is to help partners educate their customers on how to best protect their infrastructure from today’s cybersecurity threats. SonicWall’s next-generation, real-time cyber defense platform, which is built on a cloud-based multi-engine sandbox that captures malware to not only identify but also automatically block advanced threats. This capability is uniquely designed to help SMBs who lack the internal resources to pour through volumes of data on potential threats and react in time to prevent security breaches. SonicWall’s new marketing campaign will help educate SMBs on the three most prominent threats, identified in the SonicWall 2017 Annual Threat Report:

• How to stop ransomware, using multi-engine cloud-based sandboxing.
• How to protect against SSL and TLS encrypted threats using a next generation firewall with SSL/TLS Deep Packet Inspection (DPI).
• How to catch advanced phishing and other email-borne attacks using an email security solution with multi-engine cloud based sandboxing.

– Availability of SonicWall University
SonicWall University is available globally now at no cost to authorized partners participating in the SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program.